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My Mercedes Is Not For Sale

Photo 300td.org/Flickr

I was interviewed last week by Jeroen Van Bergeijk, and I’ve since had time to pick up his immensely entertaining travelogue, My Mercedes Is Not For Sale, about his odyssey to unload a used Dutch Mercedes in the second-hand car markets of Burkina Faso. Perfect staycation reading!

One passage jumped out via my own investigations into traffic culture:

“A country’s traffic a metaphor for its culture. In the Netherlands, the cars gleam, the roads are well maintained, and rules and warnings (”IF YOU CAN READ THIS, YOU’RE TOO CLOSE”), encourage motorists to drive safely and courteously. At the same time, if there are no cops in sight, everyone drives over the speed limit. The Dutchman likes to think of his country that way: clean and orderly but with a touch of antiauthoritarianism.”

Mauritania, on the other hand, presents a different picture, but I’ll leave that for you to discover…

There are some good photos of his journey here.

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This entry was posted on Friday, December 19th, 2008 at 9:15 am and is filed under Etc., Traffic Culture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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Traffic Tom Vanderbilt

How We Drive is the companion blog to Tom Vanderbilt’s New York Times bestselling book, Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us), published by Alfred A. Knopf in the U.S. and Canada, Penguin in the U.K, and in languages other than English by a number of other fine publishers worldwide.

Please send tips, news, research papers, links, photos (bad road signs, outrageous bumper stickers, spectacularly awful acts of driving or parking or anything traffic-related), or ideas for my Slate.com Transport column to me at: info@howwedrive.com.

For publicity inquiries, please contact Kate Runde at Vintage: krunde@randomhouse.com.

For editorial inquiries, please contact Zoe Pagnamenta at The Zoe Pagnamenta Agency: zoe@zpagency.com.

For speaking engagement inquiries, please contact
Jenna Meulemans at the Knopf Speaker Bureau.

Order Traffic from:

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Random House | Powell’s

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Traffic UK
Drive-on-the-left types can order the book from Amazon.co.uk.

For UK publicity enquiries please contact Rosie Glaisher at Penguin.

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